‘I’m talking to Madam Delphi, thank you, not the hired help.’

‘How dare you—’ Dara Morgan began.

‘Oh, do belt up,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘I mean, who are you anyway?’

‘I am Dara Morgan. I set up MorganTech. I created the M-TEK, I devised—’

‘Oh please, you did nothing that the Mandragora Helix didn’t tell you to. No, who are you really? Who did the Helix take, distort, manipulate and totally screw up before reimagining you as Dara Morgan?’

‘What?’

‘Lukas?’ the Doctor barked. ‘My research assistant,’ he explained quietly to Madam Delphi. ‘Donna was busy.

Family matters.’

Donna frowned. Not that he was getting Lukas Carnes to do his research, but why he’d said ‘family matters’. She

threw a look at Wilf but he shrugged. Then she glanced at Netty, staring intently at the stand-off before them. When Donna looked back at the Doctor, she recognised a look in his eyes. A look that, if given voice, would have been some variation on ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

‘No,’ she mouthed. ‘Don’t you dare!’ but the Doctor’s attention was back on Dara Morgan.

‘All over the world, Dara Morgan, billions of people will fall victim to this alien consciousness you’ve given access to the world. And that’s going to happen today.’

‘I know,’ smiled Dara Morgan. ‘How brilliant is that?’

‘Well, it’s brilliant from the point of view of your M-TEK being a pretty damn brilliant piece of technology, augmented by alien know-how and distributed quite magnificently to people who, I imagine, had no idea what it would do to them today.’

‘Not a clue.’

‘There’s a lot of blood on your hands, Dara Morgan. If I were a policeman, I’d have you arrested but, as Lukas will now explain, that’s not possible.’

‘Dara Morgan came to prominence eight years ago, making his first claims about MorganTech on a news special, broadcast live on 31 December 1999.’

‘End of the millennium, neat.’

‘Before that, there’s no trace of any such person.

MorganTech was registered as a private limited company at 5.29pm that same day.’

‘So who were you before Mandragora got hold of you?

Before reimagining itself as a human, becoming the anagrammatical Dara Morgan?’

‘Oh, I get it now,’ Wilf called out. ‘That’s very clever.’

‘Yes, thank you, Granddad,’ Donna hissed. ‘But let the Doctor focus.’

Before anyone could stop him, the Doctor put his hands to either side of Dara Morgan’s head, fingers pressed against his temples and whispered, ‘Open the locked doors, and let yourself out.’

The assembled acolytes took a step towards the Doctor, and Madam Delphi pulsed menacingly. ‘Stop him,’ she said.

In his mind’s eye, the Doctor could see an image. A dark night, cold, damp. He was walking down a lane, hedges high on either side, rain trickling down his neck.

He shivered. He was angry… No, not angry. Hurt.

Bewildered. She’d said no. No to what? Who was she? In his hand was a box, soft, velvety. And inside it, yes, he could imagine it. Silver band, plain diamond. All he had been able to afford. And she’d said no. Said that she needed to get away from Derry, wanted to go to Sydney.

Or San Diego. Or anywhere other than close to him. How had he got her so wrong? How hadn’t he seen this coming? How was it possible to love someone that much, so that every time she walked into a room, every time she spoke, smiled, laughed, his heart would leap. That just knowing she was in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the hallway was enough to send those fantastic, amazing, wonderful thoughts rushing through him? Yet when it came to it, when he’d said ‘I love you’, she’d said she wanted to get away. No ‘I love you too, but…’ No ‘Thank you, but I’m sorry.’ Just an ‘Oh my God, are you for real?

No, I’m getting away from Ireland as soon as possible. I don’t want to be tied to anything here!’

It was as if someone had ripped everything out of him that mattered and walked all over it.

You’re not the first person to fall in love and be rejected, he told himself rationally.

But he didn’t want to be rational. What was rational about being in love anyway? What was rational about offering yourself up to someone only to be squashed?

And here he was, lost and alone. Everyone had said she wasn’t interested. Everyone had tried to say he was wasting his time. But when you’re in love, you grasp at anything, you believe that one day you’ll wake up and they’ll say, ‘You know what, I’m wrong, you’re right, you are the person for me.’

But that hadn’t happened.

It never happened.

Instead he’d seen the lightning ripping across the night sky as he stumbled along the road, tears mixing with the rain, thinking that all he wanted to do was be home now.

Home.

Ten minutes’ walk, max.

More lightning. Blue, white and purple… Purple?

It struck the ground in front of him, knocking him backwards.

He remembered seeing the little box with the ring vanishing in a sudden conflagration, literally and metaphorically drawing a line under that part of his life.

He felt as if he were on fire, too. All he could see was purple light, surrounding him now, blotting out the

hedges, blotting out the road, the darkness, the rain.

And then the voice. All around. In his head. Coming from the sky and his heart at the same time.

‘It is your time. Callum Fitzhaugh is no longer relevant. Now you have a greater cause.’

The voice stayed with him long after the purple fire had gone, over days and weeks as he willingly gave himself a new purpose.

The next morning he touched the keypad on a cashpoint machine and it spurted out two hundred pounds.

Eight more cashpoints that morning. Then more in different towns. Then he set up an account. He manipulated the online banking, untraceable movements because he fed figures into the computers that erased all traces of his actions.

Within three weeks, he was a multimillionaire. He had buildings all over the world. He owned companies which he then closed or merged and, within a month, MorganTech had come into existence due to the manipulating influence of the voice in his mind that told him how to do it.

Next he had put together the computer system that would change his destiny. Somehow the voice guided him as he built Madam Delphi, felt that voice in his head transfer into the hardware, somehow, creating artificial life on a scale unheard of before now.

‘I need you,’ the voice had soothed. ‘Now and for ever.

I need a human interface, a connection to the world of flesh and blood. An avatar in reality.’

So Dara Morgan had been created.

He remembered coming from a rich family of bankers and investment traders. His parents died in a private plane crash, and MorganTech had passed to him when he was just 21.

He remembered more false memories, events, people, qualifications and parties. None of them real, but each time he imagined a part of the fictional history, it came true. The voice showed him how a society that relied on computers for information, that no longer used paper and ink to keep records, could so easily be manipulated in accepting the history, the lies, the fabrications you told it via the keyboard were true.

He remembered the voice telling him how to develop the M-TEK over a few years, so that the market would trust in it. Trust in MorganTech. This was a long game.

And he remembered seeing her in a street in Dubai one afternoon.

She was with a couple of men, going through a sheaf of documents in a roadside café.

He had listened as the men had explained that they needed to think about whatever deal they were doing and moved away. Then he went to sit beside her.

She looked up, initially intrigued, then surprised and then shocked. Eventually she found her voice. ‘Cal?’